Are the UDK skills transferable to UE4?

Community Community & Industry Discussion
1

Hello:

I am as green as you can be to game programming, I am a programmer though and I dabbled a bit in 3d modeling with modo, and I want to learn the unreal engine… I was thinking of buying a training video for UDK, in particular one of these videos from eat3d: ://eat3d/udk, ://eat3d/udk_modular or ://eat3d/udk_mobile.

I was wondering if anything I learn from these videos would be applicable to UE4. I think it should. Would it be better to start learning UE4 directly?

Thanks

2

It would transfer, but it will be a much better idea to start with ue4. There are also lots of tutorials already and templates for learning :slight_smile:

3

Most things are very similar except for Kismet and Unrealscript.

4

In addition, UE4 is extremely easier to learn than UDK. I would start directly with UE4, you have hundreds of tutorials in YT to get you on your feet.

5

Except of programming everything works nearly the same in the ue4 -> so when you have udk experience it will be easier for you to jump to the UE4

6

I would jump straight to UE4. In my opinion it is vastly different, and there are a lot of official training videos freely available from Epic that teaches you how to use UE4. I imagine the $19 to obtain UE4 would still be cheaper than the videos you are looking to purchase. Just my opinion though.

7

Hi Costa,

I don’t want to necessarily push one way or the other because the choice is yours, but you will be hard pressed to find a better supported community, support staff with the AnswerHub, and continual updates with content for the Marketplace, tutorials, documentation, and amazing new features for the Engine. There have been over a 1000 new features/fixes/improvements added in the last two releases alone!

If you’re unsure about Unreal though, you can always check out UDK, our free version of UE3, as there are a lot of similarities in the controls and how things function. Unreal Engine 4 has overhauled almost everything for a cleaner more intuitive (IMO) workflow. You can take a look at our YouTube channel to see some of our tutorial series to get a sense of how easy it is to dive right in. :slight_smile:

As a programmer, there are two things you may find more interesting. 1) Unreal Engine 4 comes with the Full Source code that you can get from GitHub with your linked UE4 account. 2) Blueprints: This is our visual scripting language that is a successor to Kismet. Much easier to use and to rapidly prototype your games. Check out some of the Blueprint vids from our YouTube page to get an idea.

As for the content you’ve linked above, I personally think the modular one would be fine. This is more a workflow with modular design and assets. This is still very much applicable to games and UE4 in general. The others are more specific to things in UDK that have since changed in UE4. Some things may carry over but there is a lot that has either been taken out, redone, or is no longer possible with our new rendering.

If you have any questions feel free to ask! :slight_smile:

8

Thank you all for the feedback. It’s pretty clear now what I have to do.

9

Game programming skills for any type of tool you opt to use (such as UDK) to develop games are nearly transferable to every tool available for game programming (like UE4 or others). For example, something I remember learning when programming with UDK was how to create a camera that moves relative to the position of the player character; just recently, that knowledge came in handy as I was able to implement a camera nearly the exact same way for a game I am making with DirectX in C++.